It's such a bizarre wonderful dreamworld of the human psyche that Kubrick created. Like if Kubrick made a Fellini film.
After two divorces, I watched it again and totally understood the whole thing. It is a great movie.
Still, my favorite is Barry Lyndon...
That sounds like a recommendation! After reading:
> Kubrick was perhaps the world's most successful maker of mainstream art films.
I'd had a vision of Kubrick as the Thomas Kinkade of the 7th art, which luckily was quickly dissipated by:
> He found a way—like few before him or since—to make interpretive movies that are commercially successful in popular culture while simultaneously appealing to cult film audiences, intellectuals and academics, cinephiles, critics, artists, and fellow filmmakers.
Of course The Shining shows that what Kubrick makes of a novel is not necessarily what the author made, but it's probably worth giving some credit for the dreamworld to Schnitzler—the novel is literally called, or so Wikipedia tells me it translates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Story), Dream Story.
I remember it being beautiful and interesting visually(and of course the incredible backwards opera music ritual scene) while missing the plot so completely after reading this article and some of the comments.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120663/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rat
> Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and A Clockwork Orange (1971)—three of his most celebrated works, and all three black comedies (about pedophilia, nuclear war, and violent crime, respectively).
Hardly comedies (except Dr.S) and the "abouts" are superficial. A Clockwork Orange is about the nature of free will, not violent crime!
The bit about Prescot Bush "who helped fund Hitler's regime" is a long bow to draw. Maybe technically true in some tiny irrelevant sense.
If anything the author is underselling the connection. Millions of 1930's dollars; gold, fuel, steel, coal, bonds etc [0] can hardly be described as 'tiny irrelevant'.
> ... the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year [2009], show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis' plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler's rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.
Prescott was also implicated in the 1933 Business Plot [1]:
> In July 2007, a BBC investigation reported that Prescott Bush, father of U.S. President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of then-president George W. Bush, was to have been a "key liaison" between the 1933 Business Plotters and the newly emerged Nazi regime in Germany,[51] although this has been disputed by Jonathan Katz as a misconception caused by a clerical research error.[52] According to Katz, "Prescott Bush was too involved with the actual Nazis to be involved with something that was so home grown as the Business Plot."[53]
Both links below offer many sources, including the BBC and The Guardian, along with multiple official archives.
0 - https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/how-bushs-grandfa...
Idk the rampant pedophilia in the movie certainly rhymes with revelations about Epstein.
I don't believe Kubrick had particular problems with the British Board of Film Censors.
The BBFC never censored A Clockwork Orange, for example. They passed it without cuts, though they had seen a pre-print of the first completed half of the movie as was the custom, and had been concerned that it might not get certification. The censor commended the final movie.
Kubrick personally pulled it from distribution in the UK, after they had passed it and it had a limited release.
https://www.bbfc.co.uk/education/case-studies/clockwork-oran...
The BBFC do not and did not edit films. They are not a government body. They did once call themselves censors (the words of the acronym changed in the 80s), but the point of the BBFC was that the film industry was censoring its own work proactively, and maintaining their own certifications, to avoid government doing it. Similar to what the MPA(A) did.
They still sometimes suggest edits that would keep a film within a particular certification.
In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, it wasn't the BBFC that made any decisions to edit and cut that film; Warner Bros themselves did, based on the US classification they were aiming for.
> Kubrick died within a week of the film release, perhaps he knew too much, perhaps not.
Or perhaps, after a stressful filming, editing and production schedule, a 70 year old man had a heart attack in his sleep.
If so he did that in 2001, whereas Kubrick died in 1999.
Related Kubrick quote from TFA:
> One of the things I always find extremely difficult, when a picture's finished, is when a writer or a film reviewer asks, "Now, what is it that you were trying to say in that picture?" And without being thought too presumptuous for using this analogy, I like to remember what T.S. Eliot said to someone who had asked him—I believe it was The Waste Land—what he meant by the poem. He replied, "I meant what I said." If I could have said it any differently, I would have. ("The Odyssey Begins", 1960 Horizon interview)
Spelling everything out for the (supposedly dim-witted) audience at the close is, reversely, something that frustrates me.
Still remember reading the book the movie is based on: “Traumnovelle” by Arthur Schnitzler.
Having read this during high school and also AFTER seeing the movie adaption, iirc the closing conversation vary by quite a bit.
The Very Bad Wizards podcast on it is interesting/fun too. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/very-bad-orgies-kubric...
